Multiplayer games generally don't.
Haven't tried this one yet, but in my experience it's like 90% of single player games work and the remaining 10% will never work.
Windows: 94.10%
Linux: 3.68%
macOS: 2.21%
This is actually a major cheat. Realism is expensive, and exposes your creation to the equivalent of the "uncanny valley" for vehicle simulation - the simulated world is never accurate enough and you can't help but notice the differences with reality. E.g. if you see generic buildings ("autogen") near a location you know IRL, the simulation feels immediately sloppy.
Yet, as long as I'm not interested in visiting real places, I would go for a vehicle simulation in a fictional world any day. I wouldn't mind if the vehicles were also fictional, as long as they require some technique to drive them. What matters in games is challenge and mastery, but not what you master; your RTS, FPS or chess skills have very little value IRL.
> Zoom out far enough—and for some reason it will let you—and you see the tiles, the roads that don’t line up, and the various tricks and techniques that allow it to look so realistic from low down. But don’t do that! That’s silly. This is a train sim, not a plane sim, you’ve no business in the sky.
OpenBVE one-upped BVE train sim with external cameras, and as a result you see all this too. In my eyes, they sort of miss the point of a train simulation: the view point is normally attached to the driver, so one can use all sorts of tricks to avoid having to "paint the entire wall" - which is quite important if you count on a community of fan modders who have limited resources.
My first piece of advice is: Pick one mechanic or idea, and ship it all the way to a player (a friend) to see if it's legible or fun.
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.
You could make a bullet hell game engine as a project in an intro CS course.
The hard part is the content in the game, and ZUN was already a composer. That just leaves the code which is easy, and the bullet patterns, which ZUN clearly improved at through his earlier games. (and the art, which is famously bad though endearing)
Am I the only one that thinks the word "pretty" is overused to describe the visual quality and artistry of games? I see this word thrown around often and it feels so low-effort.
I personally probably won't play Mixtape or this game but both look like good experiences to me if you are in the respective target audience.
I can't find a website for the developer, also nothing listed in the Indonesian Wikipedia article. Sadly no way to buy it directly and give them 100% of the money in their currency
https://partner.steamgames.com/pricing/explorer?l=english&ut...
Would you say a car is just accelerate, breaking, and steering?
But I also have had it installed via Crossover at some points to check out a Windows-only game.
Which I just realize also skews the statistic because Crossover basically creates a Windows VM.
The fact that the Steam number is as high as it is, despite the extreme lack of compatible content, is noteworthy.
Are you building a single player or multiplayer game?
...seriously, 99%+ of the job of a conductor (and of a pilot) could be automated, the reason you still have a person (or two) in the cockpit is the rest of the time. As the saying goes, "flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror". And the same is also valid for trains. There are automated trains, but AFAIK all of them are metros or people movers where the whole system is closed off (platform doors etc.) and track conditions are closely monitored. I'm not aware of an automated train running on a "traditional" track network.
Programming is like 10% of a game. The world building and UX is the juice.
Anybody can make Lord of the Rings, but there's only one.
But ZUN started on the PC-98.
To put that platform in a western context, imagine if IBM had gone with planar graphics for VGA. Or an Amiga with no coprocessors, sprites, or scrolling[0]. You have a lot of pixels to fill and no help to do it with. It can't even run DooM[1]. Most other developers threw their hands up and shipped RPGs, erotic visual novels, or porn. Getting a fast action game running on PC-98 is a genuine accomplishment.
[0] I am aware that I just described a compact Macintosh.
That very much depends on how much they did themselves. If they used unity, and went very light on the simulation, sure.
> You could make a bullet hell game engine as a project in an intro CS course.
No you couldn’t. Well you could but it wouldn’t be appropriate for actual beginners unless you stripped it down so much that calling it an engine was meaningless.
You definitely can. One of the assignments in the CS intro course I took was a bullet hell game. "calling it an engine was meaningless" is an opinion that requires ignoring the fundamentals of what a game engine is.
Let me ask you this. What were the parameters of your assignment? What libraries were you allowed to use.
We are very quickly going to see the reality: games are made by programmers. Everyone else who has spent decades comfortably riding on the programmers backs is being replaced by AI. This includes the artists, the junior programmers, the testers, all of them. The future isn't bloated teams, it's going to be just one lone genius (or a small group of programming geniuses banding together) and his magnum opus across the board.
Good luck with your idea tho
I vouched for you
If the licensing allows for it I’m fine.
So, 90% isn't most in your book?
So, yeah, shit like the latest CoD, Valorant, Apex Legends [0], and that godawful Marathon game won't run... but that's because of active work by the devs to make it so that it won't.
[0] ...for some crazy reason...
"generally" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Marathon, no Linux support.
Call of Duty, no Linux support.
Battlefield 6, no Linux support.
Valorant, no Linux support.
The Finals works and is great, but I'd be mindful of what games I'm giving up if considering a full switch
Before that Arma Reforger.
Before that Arc Raiders.
There are a very small minority of games that use kernel-level anticheat that won't work, including newer BF6 and COD. Tbh I wouldn't play those anyway because of that feature, which sucks because BF series was fun.
Was, yeah.
I enjoyed the hell out of BF I and BF V. I also enjoy shooters that have "modern" weaponry. Given how fun BF I was at launch, and V was when I picked it up, I purchased a copy of BF 2042 at launch because -given that that's the time before the "I'm going to do nothing but snipe from spawn to maxxximise my KDR and get Sick Youtube Clips" crew comes to be the majority of the playerbase- that's the best time to play these games.
I regret that purchasing decision so much. BF 2042 was very, very pretty. It looked so good. But -as a game- it was so bland and boring.
Bad Company 2 is probably my fav next to BF4
But if the biggest multiplayer games straight up don't support it, that needs to be acknowledged.
Add League of Legends to the list.
I've had Deck verified games straight up refuse to work on Linux.
It always feels like it's my fault somehow. 'Well of COURSE Wayland doesn't work, skill issue'. Vs Windows where I can blame Microsoft.
Yep. Devs usually have to actively make their game not work on Proton for it to not work on the version of Proton that Steam ships. Most devs aren't so petty as to put in that extra work, so they don't.
Being able to use the Unreal Engine for free to develop this is awesome. This couldn't have happened 10 years ago.
I will sin and make this about me, briefly, but just to say that when I was a kid/teenager with a really slow computer, a) I enjoyed coding much more, b) I think I was a way better programmer. Constraints make you better, you have to be smarter. I miss those times.
Personally, I think the reason you enjoyed it more as a teenager is just down to the fact you were fully in control of what to do and had no external pressure to earn money etc, so if anything you had less constraints - at least from my point of view
As, if there are no constraints in some specific area, there is no kinda "survival need" to improve there, hence brain is not working as hard/smart/deep as it could.
In general I highly recommend going the embedded/IoT way if you look for challenges and constraints.
:)
(assuming he did all the assets himself and didn't use AI, which might be a bit naive)
I agree. Something similar could have happened 30 years ago, and it did, see Transport Tycoon (or a lot of early games). But from 2000 to 2020?
b) Chris Sawyer had a team of graphic artists etc, IIRC
c) TT is not about a "train sim", but a business sim
Yes, some games have some issues but it really seems like that is a problem of developers not knowing when to say 'No!' to the giant tool kit they have been provided.
I have more faith in Epic the engine company than the other Epics.
When you consider that 16GB has become the minimum requirement for modern A+ titles (with the Windows OS & background tasks squating on 4-6GB). Creating such a title might be difficult on memory limited machine.
Unreal had made some improvements in this regard recently, with direct from storage assets loading & stuff.
... and paying Epic 5% of all lifetime profit is a blessing too (if he makes money appropriate for "the best train sim ever made")
We already know what happens in Nebraska.
This just makes me feel so glad to be alive today!
I'm working on a bit of a hobby project to rebuild a beefier Mascon. Mainly inspired by how much I enjoyed Running Train
Joy2Key has been a staple for many a gamer for a while, and reliable. I've used it to control my mouse, even, from my gamepad.
I don't have a TSC-X, but did frown a little bit that there wasn't a generic support for controllers with plain axes. I have a VKB STECS, and basically a 85% of train sims need a workaround.
The good news: Claude Code threw together a working prototype for me in a few minutes that had me mapping the two axes (power / brakes) perfectly. It's really a low barrier to entry these days. Can confirm that this game is amazing with it.
> While the game encourages you to master the reasonably simple controls of its range of perfectly crafted engines, you can also just set it to play itself and then take over the free camera as it does.
That seems like a perfectly valid way to experience the game to me.
If you want a review service or consumer guide then pay for it.
That is industry standard
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1033030/MaSzyna/
Turns out that such a vehicle, even though simple in principle, has quite the startup procedure and a layman would have trouble making it go.
For one person it's impressive, but it won't knock the major players down any time soon.
what has improved a lot recently is the physically based rendering - specifically, the lighting. Looking at the steam page, this train game has that type of lighting.
Another game that uses similarly realistic lighting is https://store.steampowered.com/app/2406770/Bodycam/
But starfield, which was widely criticized by fans, was over 100 people and 8 years development. With the most common criticism from former devs being about the additional management structure and difficulty of communication.
I can’t help but feel there is a lesson there for tech companies where engineering orgs for products are 200+ people when a 20-30 person startup is your top competitor in the vertical.
I'm not into trains, but I felt bad for this guy so I spent 15 minutes at his booth and let him show me everything. It seemed to have made his day.
Highly recommend if you like having something interesting on in the background.
But I don't see how it'd entertain me for hours on end. If someone here is into these sim games, what's the reason you keep going back to them?
Personally if I were going to adopt a nerdy train hobby, I would tend more toward train photography. Recently train photographers have been in the news for mostly bad reasons [1], but I have also seen train photographers setting up in rural locations and the scenery looks stunning and also totally chill. The problems arise when people gather en masse to get the "iconic" shots that have been probably been photographed a million times before.
Or just go out and actually ride a bunch of different routes. It's been a long time since I've done it, but just riding a local or express train through a scenic area is delightful.
Of course there's no reason that true train afficianados can't do all of the above, as well as building model trains!
[1] https://petapixel.com/2025/12/15/japanese-railway-pleads-wit...
I would love a trip across the high plains and through the mountains by train. Just like I would love to take a cruise from the bottom of the Mississippi to the top.
But them tickets is too high.
Though when you add in the costs of getting to the start/end of the line, overnight accomodations, and potentially the cost of getting to Japan first - it gets quite a bit more expensive. But staying at a little guesthouse along the way is also part of the charm.
[1] https://fukushima.travel/blogs/tadami-line-5-sights-you-shou...
:)
It works brilliantly with the Zuiki Mascon controller.
Is THIS the in-game graphics of the game??
If Yes - just WOW!!
How much AI did the person use?
I highlight this not to bring those developers down, but because I think it’s important people understand how these things actually come to be, so they aren’t discouraged to try themselves by thinking they ought to actually be doing 100% of the work solo. That’s pretty rare.
Point being, it depends on which skills you bring to the table, which ones you are willing to learn and which ones are worth collaborating on.
I still think the term Solo-developer is justified in any case. The one who soley carries the burden of bringing the game from idea to the finish line is the solo developer, IMHO.
The domains of different crafts are ever-expanding, including all of their history and all new developments, of which new developments seem to be coming at an ever-increasing pace as populations grow, internet access grows, and the free time of populations spent doing things other than merely surviving grows. There is a larger and broader base of knowledge necessary for a person to be considered competent in the current state of anything, and the number of disciplines is also increasing. Two decades ago, having a person specializing in frontend development for a specific web browser would have been unthinkable.
All of this work is built upon the backs of other people. Game engines, 3d modeling and texturing and animating, language design and implementation, audio software and sound design, graphics libraries, runtime optimizations, operating system APIs, networking improvements, distribution networks, etc. etc.. To think that any one person could possibly create everything they use to then create these final products, no matter the scale they are, is ignorant.
I think for the later stages it's common to contract someone for other platforms, especially mobile.
Now a days you can also get basically endless assets for free. Unreal gives away a new pack every few weeks or so on Fab (and has been doing this for years), KitBash3D gives occasionally gives away some amazing assets, and many more. But again none of this matters without some serious artistic and style sense. Given I recognize at least one asset there, I'd imagine a good chunk of his assets are from stuff like this. But you're not going to be able to clone anything comparable even if you had the exact assets he used. Placement and such is way more of an artistic thing than you might expect.
I'm sure there's a treasure trove of already-built high-quality assets of Japanese trains.
Assets are generally cheap, unity asset store itch.io
Unless you commission someone for work 1-2K would cover many small games easily.
Driving the train is a little technical, but not overwhelmingly so. You need to pay attention to the gradient, speed, train weight and rail slipperiness to brake with perfect accuracy every time you come to a station. Signalling is not overly complex but you can benefit from tabbing over to a reference sheet every so often (Ah, double flashing yellow means we’re on a diverging route ahead with a reduced turnout speed so I must brake soon). Learning the german safety systems (PZB and LZB) was interesting. Guiding a 3000t freight train down a mountain isn’t something that can be rushed, it forces you to slow down and be patient.
So relaxation mostly. I can launch the game, drive something somewhere for an hour or two, get some endorphins because I did it all right, etc.
But in return they add very technically difficult tasks, such as stopping within a millimeter of the stopping point within a second of the time in the timetable without re-braking or making passengers uncomfortable, or stuff such as pointing at signals. They even add completely unrealistic stuff just for the sake of gameplay such as bonus zones where you need to stay at an exact speed, sounding the horn for overpasses and level crossings, or dimming the lights for oncoming trains.
They "feel" very different to games like Train Sim World, but I like them both regardless.
edit: This actually sounds awesome
I play Euro Truck Simulator 2 (ets) and its my happy place, its just zen, Sometimes i will have a plugin that will get me local radio stations and i will cruise through italy and greece listening to talk shows in languages i don't understand, sometimes i will do it listening to the rumble of the truck, and i switch off, and allow my thoughts to run free.
I've recently started getting into flight sims, and i'm looking for the same sort of thing with that (the only problem with ets is the graphics still looks like a 2013 game) and i think i will get there, its just i'm at the 'learning to fly' stage, and thats kinda difficult. Well, actually flying is surprisingly easy, landing is the tricky bit ;-)
Depending where you're flying, some arrivals have gaps which threw me off massively when I first started - it's because IRL there's ATC there to guide you to the final intersection for the runway, usually 10NM out... so aim for that and capture ILS, it's quite a wide margin for capture.
If you're going manually, 10nm out you want to start descending at around 600-700fpm from ~3000ft and you should have visual on the runway at this point
And I find myself wanting to do that, even without the progression I crave from a game. But then I also feel like I'm massively wasting my time, and I could be playing other games, getting stuff done around the house, or just reading a book. Instead of driving a tractor for no freaking reason. But I still want to do it.
The real question is, how do you determine who is going to do negative or positive gains. A debate that is millennia old.
I have a theory it is a mindfulness thing like many hobbies.
Think knitting or crochet or even building and running a model train set in the garage. These things aren't terribly hard once you learn the basics but you have to pay attention to various details over time and it allows you to tune out from the rest of the world when you want to.
But I really don't know.
At least, that's my working model of it.
Farming simulator and Car mechanic simulator are both in my todo list, because those are hobbies I’m truly interested in pursuing and I’d like to know what it’s like to do them as a sim first. Most other live sims like this are deeply uninteresting to me, even if they have lovely visuals. Meanwhile I’ve seriously considered buying a Renesas SH-2A simulator for nearly $3k so that I can develop better car software!
Is there some job you’ve always wanted to do that requires extensive training that you can’t / won’t complete at this time? That would be a use case for sims that’s less game and more hobby for you (but that’s always a blurry line for all of us so don’t take that as criticism).
A lot of train sim are about building the rail network, where Running Train focuses on driving. The scenery (dozens of kilometers of japanese railway) is beautiful and it reproduces the japanese railway system realistically.
For some people, just the fact that it's a simulation is enough to make it fun. But to many others, the challenge (and I can promise you it is quite difficult) is what makes it a fun game.
I've been playing these games for half a decade now, and I've only managed a zero zero once (meaning that you come to a stop exactly on time to the second and stop within 0.0cm of the marker.)
But they are considered at least a 'rung' lower than games journalists when it comes to how much access they have, and how much their opinion matters professionally.
True, but this also means that the bar has risen for animations in general, so while you might be able to create animations today as an amateur that is even better than the animations just five years ago, it still won't come close to what professionals can actually achieve today.
Your very last point speaks a lot to me though, almost every effort people are amazed by have at least two people involved, indirectly or directly, and attempting things like this on your own would be a fool's errand.
Currently, the only criteria is money. You can literally just buy anything at any time, if you have the cash. Tractors, land, buildings... Anything. Almost all of it is instant. The few things that aren't instant are just annoying and not worth the effort.
There is a mod that unlocks tractors according to the year, matching them up with when they were released. That's at least a kind of progression, but still not what I'd enjoy.
In short, I think I want it more gamified and less of a straight simulation. Unlocking better tractors would mean reaching certain goals while using lesser tractors, etc. Motor Town has this. You need to do a certain amount of work with lesser machines to unlock the later ones. You also need the money.
But it would also go beyond what the game has. For some reason, you can be hired as a contractor for things, and rent the necessary equipment for fairly cheap. But as a landowner, you have to micromanage that situation. It's up to you to have the equipment and actually be ready to do the work before you can hand it off to an AI worker. And they're often terrible at it, especially with the lesser-used machines, like (according to a bug report I saw) carrot harvesters.
The game absolutely nails simulating driving a tractor. But as a "game", it fails.
I have problems.
"I love how men go from 'I'm gonna conquer the world!!' to 'im gonna sit here and paint my model figures'"
I think about it a lot, and your comment made me think of it again.
Flight sims are my 'model railways'
Driving simulations - be it planes, cars, trucks, boats, etc - are maybe a bit different, but essentially it's just a combination of chill vibe, romanticized experience (the classic "I wish I could be a farmer", no you don't) and a degree of what I described above. Obviously there are also people who are just passionate about trains, planes and such.
The chill cozy games are a real trend, and it's due to what I described in the 1st paragraph.
So you need the solo developer not to contract out or buy in existing music, graphics, 3D assets, animations, marketing, or you won't call them a solo developer.
Right, so do you also need them to create the 3D engine or are they allowed that off the shelf? Oh, they need to make it themselves. You're strict!
Ok, so they're allowed to write for a platform? Oh, no they're not, that's relying on other people's code.
And writing in an existing language? Tsk tsk tsk. Got to invent the programming language yourself, otherwise you need to list the entire GCC/LLVM team as your collaborators on the game.
They have to create their own silicon too, it's cheating to rely other people's chips, how can you call yourself "solo"?
Are they allowed to sell it on Steam or do they need to build their own store and payment networks? Heck, should they get themselves accredited as a payment network. Oh, and as a bank.
And presumably, if the game needs to be translated to any language other than the developer's own, they have to do that translation themselves, right? Not rely on experts in that language. Can't really be a "solo" dev that way, can you?
And so on.
Building a game involves effort, and millions of decisions. Is the gameplay right? Is the story right? Are the graphics right? Design the characters, the levels, the world. Make the game run. Make the game available?
I can accept that solo developers will sometimes make the graphics/music/"assets" themselves, sometimes buy off the shelf, sometimes pay others. But unless they hire that person full time to collaborate on the game... they're still the solo developer.
They will definitely lean on existing 3D engines, libraries, plugins, font engines... and that reminds me, I've almost never seen a game developer design their own fonts. These reusable components can be used in games, and some are even intended to (e.g. engine plugins). But do they define the game experience? Generally, no. That's on the game developer.
Here is Jonathan Blow's placeholder art for Braid: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Braid-art-1.j...
Here is how good David Hellman, the artist he hired, made it: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2e/Braid-art-2.j...
David Hellman is credited as the game's artist, but it's still effectively Jonathan Blow's game from top to bottom.
Steam (which I'm guessing you're talking about) is nowhere close of being a monopoly. There are loads of alternatives out there, in wide use by people already. World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Minecraft, Roblox and more are all examples of big time successful games that never been available on Steam.
Of those options, the BBS one is probably the lowest cost, but -"shockingly"- that option is still available today... and is probably way easier for people to find your software than it was back in the day.
There are astroturfers out there who pretend that Steam is The Worst Thing Ever, but they distribute your game, dev-selected old (and pre-release) versions of your game, promotional materials for your game, and host forums and a news feed... forever. Valve also pretty clearly chooses to distribute games that are in the intersection of what's legal to distribute in the US and what the busybodies at MasterCard and Visa permit them to distribute.
If we lived in a just world, because of MasterCard's and Visa's enormous size, they'd be declared as something like "payment processors of last resort" and required to process transactions for anything that's legal to sell in the US, and subject to enormous fines if they so much as suggest to any merchant that MC/Visa will stop processing that merchant's payments for any reason other than a clear and obvious history of fraud.
Alas.
Many games I own started their life distributed exclusively through a platform other than steam.
Arguably, you don't even want to approach steam distribution until you've already collected your hype. Steam no longer can surface gems, because it's just far too flooded, so you should seek alternative channels in general.
This hasn't been my experience. I've found that running the "Discovery Queue" a few times once or twice a week brings up an interesting game or two every month. It also brings up a bunch of stuff I'm not interested in, but that's the nature of game development... what you make isn't going to be particularly interesting to most folks.
There's also the "Show me a random game" link, which is fun to hit and see what crap it presents you. [0]
There are successful indie games that only entered Steam late in their lives.
sits back with popcorn
Yes, if you're also doing game design.
> Is coming up with the game design and hiring programmers "developing" the game?
Yes, so is using LLMs to do the programming.
Not making fun of it, I just found it fascninating.
Also very different when you are in control of exactly when you're doing it, you can pause anytime you need to go grab laundry, etc.
Driving/train sims have pretty much zero appeal to me, but I enjoy flight sims a fair amount. I'd never want to make the sacrifices to my life that would be required to be a commercial pilot. Being a personal/hobby pilot is very expensive and quite a bit more dangerous.
But I see the crashing isn't the objective of the game but rather a consequence of its realism. Nice!
Which is why dieting and quitting smoking are famously easy things to do! ;)
There's something to be said for the "scrappyness" of resource limitations inflicted upon you when solving some problem. A sense of Triumph against the Universe itself is a nice pay-off
What's easier is removing the constraints you just added artificially. Constraints you can remove with a flick of a finger are not constraints.
> so why don't you add them back
The reason the proverb says "necessity is the mother of invention" is because "desire" is usually not enough to drive it. It's easy to take the hard road when you're forced onto it, but very hard to choose it when there's an easy alternative.
Why not? Who cares how/why they're there, as long as you follow the constraints, regardless of how easy they are to remove, they're still there.
I frequently use this when stuck creatively in music production. "Ok, now I can only use this filter for any sound shaping", or "Make a song using only instruments outputting mono", or "Maximum 10 cables to make a new sound on the modular synth" or whatever. Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
The people who face them. The constraints are making the goal harder to reach. The goal is on the other side of the constraints and it takes power of will to refuse to remove them and keep pushing. This forces a different, slower, more difficult to reach solution.
> when stuck creatively in music production
So you're not introducing constraints, you're creatively trying out things to fix your problem. They're not a wall preventing you from reaching your goal, they're the bridge. Your constraint is the temporary lack of creativity, and what you introduce is the means to reach the solution faster.
> Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
When you remove these you're stuck in a creativity block and failed to achieve your goal. When you remove actual constraints you make the goal easier to reach. It's a matter of perspective and what you want to achieve. You wouldn't want a long road through the mountains as your daily commute but it's probably lovely as a hike.
The only way to make the problems comparable is to set a programming goal of "write the most efficient code to do X" but for real work the goal is almost always "do X".
I'd wish to get a project that's low-level, multi-year and high quality of engineering and longevity. Make the best you can – something to be proud of.
With the industry’s album release cycle, bands are often under time pressure to cut a new album, so they end up writing in the studio, each person laying down tracks individually, and missing out on all the feedback of earlier iterations.
If I were forced to write music, now, for money or whatever, it would be bad music.
Technically it's easy. Mentally it's nearly impossible. This comment posted on Ars yesterday blew my mind:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-becom...
tl;dr: When given the easy option, people always take it, even when they know the hard route would be better in the long term. But the full story is interesting and not that long, it's worth reading.
As it happens, I do this. I have various projects burning for years and yet to be published because in my hobby time I value good engineering over results.
Unreal is free to the extent it contributes to bringing even more people into the ecosystem, eventually becoming paying customers, Epic doesn't make it available out of their kindness, rather also taking into account there are other competing alternatives.
A nonprofit means actual reports about how money is used, and it's not as if commercial projects are somehow better because they don't fold or get sold or canceled.
And even between commercial ways, charging royalties is one of the worst. It doesn't cost Epic extra if my game starts making more money. Just make the engine a one-time purchase (per version, so you get to keep sales going) and everyone will be much happier. Sell additional services which actually do cost you money to keep up (multiplayer hosting).
"Order today! PO box 286 DOS... Except in Nebraska!"
xkcd has the answer.
If unreal cost money up front, would this have been built? No.
Unreal is saying: hey, we contributed to 1/20th of your success, because you could not have done this without us.
Thus, in the event that you're extremely successful, yes, you'll owe unreal a million dollars. But that's only because you made 20mm and keep 19mm for yourself.
That's an incredible bargain.
Sounds like a happy problem to me;)
By the way you don't only have to file a report for Epic whenever you release a game using UE, you also have to report them your yearly sales and calculate what income is "directly attributable to UE" for that game. For an ordinary small person, for whom you imply lifetime 5% off gross worldwide revenue is a "happy problem", this is way more involved (and prone to legal liability) compared to app stores. You will probably have to hire people well before the million mark to make sure numbers are OK and you don't accidentally owe Epic $$$$$.
I know which model I would choose. Probably the one where I raise prices by 30% and don't have to deal with anything else.
It's a free choice to use the engine, you can use another engine or make your own if 5% is too much for you.
You know it's not 1 mil per year, it's 1 mil over your lifetime
I would be okay with getting 75% of everything earned over $1M.
They could sell the engine and sell new versions separately as one time purchase.
> I would be okay with getting 75% of everything
I'd be okay getting 70% from the start. That's not what it's about.
steam did provide the basic dev/hosting/sale/marketing platform.
Heck steam takes 30% which is much more egregious but factoring in costs of running steam, payment processing and the free marketing its almost always worth it.
Share a counter argument to how it should be please.
The engine itself is far from cutting edge and missing several features that are now quite common elsewhere, like texture streaming, bindless textures, etc. The speed of development isn't blazing fast either (see the implementation of the traits system). Devs are excellent at what they do but one could wonder how much faster and further it could go with more fundings.
> Sell additional services which actually do cost you money to keep up
After a game has been released a solo dev often has very little work to do, since they've already invested all of the development time ahead of release. So, by this logic they shouldn't really be allowed to charge anything for the game, except to cover potential work on updates.
Perhaps game projects don't need to operate like nonprofits, but then why do game engine projects?
Anyway, while 1 million isn't really enough to retire instantly, for sure it lets you retire 10-20 years earlier if you're just a little bit smart with money.
I feel like we're talking past each other. Adding these sort of requirements in order to "fix the problem", is typically what people are referring to as "adding artificial constraints to foster creativity".
The goal is making a song, anything that restricts you on how you are allowed to do this, is a constraint, as far as I understand the word "constraint" at least.
> When you remove actual constraints you make the goal easier to reach.
Yes, this is why the previous examples are constraints, not "bridges". Without them it's easier, with them it's harder.
> I was a kid/teenager with a really slow computer [...] b) I think I was a way better programmer. Constraints make you better, you have to be smarter.
The goal is "write software" not "write optimized software".
When your goal is to write a software that runs on your machine, having the constraint of a slow machine forces you to write optimized code which is a slower, more difficult solution. When you have an unconstrained fast machine you can write boilerplate unoptimized code, which is quick and easy. If you constrain your fast computer you go from "easy solution" to "difficult solution" for the same goal of "write software". No programmer will ever say "making the computer slower really helped a lot to write code".
Your goal is "make a creative song" but you're stuck. You don't introduce constraints because they'll make it harder to get unstuck, you introduce them to make it easier. You literally said "they still help a lot".
> I frequently use this when stuck creatively in music production. [...] Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
That's what you're missing. For you the real constraint would be to get creatively unstuck without any tricks. You are introducing things to help you reach your goal to get unstuck. You're expecting programmers to introduce things that prevent them from reaching their goal of creating programs that run.
In reality one huge reason software is slow and unoptimized is because programmers have beefy machines and can afford to take the easy road.
I didn't expect this simple concept will need so many explanations.
You and me both brother :)
> No programmer will ever say "making the computer slower really helped a lot to write code".
I guess I'll be the first, as a programmer I do this all the time, when developing browser stuff I frequently throttle the available bandwidth and introduce jitter in the network connections so I can see and understand how things work with less optimal network connections, loads of us professional programmers do this when aiming for high quality software meant for end-users, in loads of different environments, not just browser development. Making the computer/IO/whatever slower/"less" does help a lot to write software for others.
> You're expecting programmers to introduce things that prevent them from reaching their goal of creating programs that run.
Well, yes and no. I expect professional programmers, my peers, to do this, as this is how you typically build reliable software, but I don't expect everyone to do this, definitively not amateurs just programming for fun.
> Your goal is "make a creative song" but you're stuck. You don't introduce constraints because they'll make it harder to get unstuck, you introduce them to make it easier. You literally said "they still help a lot".
Cheers for the attempt to decide what my goal is but no, the goal never is "make a creative song", the goal is precisely as previously stated: "make a song". Helpful tip for the future, read and understand what people write and don't assume they lie or misunderstand their own intention, and it'll be easier to understand other's point of view.
Regardless, I feel like both of us are digged into our understanding what the whole "add constraints to do better" process means and is, and no harm no foul, what I know helps me and I'm sure what you know helps you, so lets just leave it at that :) Wish you the best of weekends!
For me wearing a parachute is a constrain and carrying it is an act of will. For a skydiver not so much.
Again, my goal is "Ship working software", I don't care about optimizing at all, just baselevel "working" state of things, that's why I test things like reliability. But also again, our perspectives and understanding of terms seems to diverge a bunch, so much that discussing them seems relatively fruitless, at least seemingly to the two of us.
You are simply making up nonsense. It is not a lot of work as most likely sales are being driven through a handful of platforms. Reporting is simple and no different than doing your taxes. It is very much a happy problem. Similar to having to pay more taxes. There is more burden but you are making more money.
Your argument is insane because Indonesia average income in USD on the high side is around $300. If you make $1mm USD, having to do some extra paperwork and pay $50k per $1mm of revenue is an awesome problem to have.
Unreal is like venture capital or a book advance (or the equivalent in music record deal)
Can you self publish? Sure, of course, have fun. But if you want the support and infrastructure of a company that understands the business of books, you take a deal and it is just like this: if a bunch of authors get book advances, that is generous to the ones who are unsuccessful, and they can only do that _because they capture the upside of those that are successful_.
Without that, you don't get advances for anyone.
So the point I'm making here: unreal provides variance reduction for all game publishers and yes that disproportionately benefits the ones who make under a million. But they're the ones who need the help!
And in exchange, if you're one of the lucky few, you pay a shockingly reasonable 5% in perpetuity.
Edit: NM you are a new account. Shadow banned on my end. Enjoy!
My contention is that people can build more ambitious games that are more likely to make their creators rich if they use Unreal, and if the creators also think that they should use Unreal and if they don't they shouldn't.
I'm not saying it's a terrible model and it's great that games are made with it but let's be honest it's not all rainbows.
"it's not all rainbows" - I would also not let perfect be the enemy of the good here.
You do, becaude I explained... It's subscription based. It's fundamentally the same because in both cases you don't own it. Epic's is just with the added element of freebie at first
weird how HN is up with pitchforks against that but OK with Epic's.
I just fundamentally disagree with this line of thinking:
> even a subscription is better than royalties
Royalties are a great business model that allows more creators to create. You can dislike it, but I genuinely don't know that this game would exist with a different business model, and I want it to be easy to make art (or other things!)
And while there were a bunch of interesting side effects of piracy (people who pirate more music were bigger fans of music and spent more later - correlation/causation questions obvs), I would strongly prefer that the easy thing to do (ie cheapest/lowest friction to get started) be legal
I think the guy did it on enthusiasm and if he used say Godot he could probably have a pretty good result too, if less impressive visually. But you have good points, sure.
